Two New Exoplanets Orbiting Red Dwarfs Discovered To Have Saturn-Like Mass

Tens of thousands of light years away from Earth, two new exoplanets were discovered by scientists using gravitational microlensing. The recently detected exoplanets were reported to have a mass similar to Saturn and orbits M dwarfs beyond the snow line.

According to Phys Org, the two new exoplanets were named as OGLE-2013-BLG-0132b and OGLE-2013-BLG-1721b. The planets were discovered through the collaboration of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) group and the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) collaboration.

With that said, the exoplanets were said to be detected through the process of gravitational microlensing. In which was identified to be the technique that enables dim or faint objects in space to be seen. The exoplanet was described to orbit its star at a distance of 3.6 AU. Meanwhile, OGLE-2013-BLG-1721b orbits its star at 2.6 AU. The exoplanets were 97 percent and 214 percent as massive as Saturn, respectively.

"Both events were too short and too faint to measure a reliable parallax signal and hence the lens mass. We, therefore, used a Bayesian analysis to estimate masses of both planets," the exoplanet study published in arXiv pre-print server noted. The Bayesian analysis used by the OGLE and MOA scientists were concluded to be faint hence disabling them to find a reliable parallax signal.

Moreover, both the exoplanet’s system were said to be located 20,500 light years away from the Earth. The international group of researchers utilized the 1.3-m Warsaw Telescope located at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the 1.8-m MOA-II telescope at the Mount John University Observatory, located in New Zealand as Sputnik News reported.

Nonetheless, the Near InfRared Camera (NIRCam) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was mentioned to possibly delve further into the nature of the two Saturn-like mass exoplanets as soon as it will be launched in 2018. Follow-up high-resolution imaging observations were also identified to be conducted in the future.